The Sabin Center has recently posted a working paper, Downstream and Upstream Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Proper Scope of NEPA Review. The paper was co-authored by Executive Director Michael Burger and Associate Director and Fellow Jessica Wentz and will be published in the Fall 2016 edition of the Harvard Environmental […]
NEPA
17 posts
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Fellow Yesterday, the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) released the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) for the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program. The DPEIS accounts for the impacts of climate change on program activities. It does not, […]
Last week marked an important shift in executive policy on fossil fuel leasing: the Interior Department announced a moratorium on new leases for coal mined from federal lands, pending a comprehensive reexamination of the decades-old coal leasing program. Interior will prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to examine how […]
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Fellow Earlier this month, I visited Savannah, Georgia to talk with concerned citizens about the environmental review process for oil and gas infrastructure in their state. My presentation focused on how the public can use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to ensure that agencies […]
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow Although it has become more common for agencies in preparing environmental impact statements (EISs) to acknowledge the impacts of climate change on a project and its affected environment, it is still quite rare for agencies to accurately incorporate this knowledge into final decisions […]
By Katee Kline, Legal Intern On July 24, the Department of the Interior released a final programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) identifying prime areas for solar development, approving seventeen large-scale energy projects on public lands, and outlining the procedure for approval of similar projects. The PEIS, authored by the DOI’s Bureau […]
By Patrick Woolsey, CCCL Intern The issue of sea level rise (SLR) related to climate change is increasingly being addressed in federal environmental impact statements (EISs) for coastal projects. As described in a previous post, the Center for Climate Change Law (CCCL) has prepared a database of EISs that address […]
By Patrick Woolsey, CCCL Intern U.S. Government agencies have begun to incorporate consideration of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions into the environmental impact statements (EISs) which they are required to produce under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). However, federal agencies have developed widely varying procedures for addressing the […]